Fast Detector Simulation Specification and Usage

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Interested people (session 1) Simon Dean, Jon Butterworth, Peter Loch, Samir Ferrag, Frank-Peter Schilling, Fabio Maltoni, Matthew Schwartz, Steve Mrenna, Andy Buckley, Joanna Weng


While in general it is to hoped that experiments will correct for detector effects, producing particle-level measurements valid within some systematic uncertainty, this is not always the case. Some key measurements only exist in uncorrected form, and a detector smearing or acceptance needs to be applied to theoretical/MC results before they can be compared to the data. Also, in some phenomenological evaluations of possible new measurements, it is desirable to have a rough simulation to estimate their robustness against detector effect.

We propose to evaluate tools in this area, and examine the requirements they might need to meet. A key issue is likely to be a standard output format for "reconstructed" objects such as jets, missing transverse energy etc.

  • Possible physics requirements
    • Acceptance, resolution, trigger and reconstruction efficiency
    • Granularity
    • Magnetic field
    • B-tagging

Review of Software Requirements (integration into tool chain)

  • Standardized input from generators

The discussion in Session 1 recommended that the input format be HepMC. Detector simulation should be generator independent and so should restrict itself to looking at final state (status code 1) particles.

  • Standardized output to Rivet and/or user code

The discussion in Session 1 suggested ideas based on "Reconstructed Objects" which would be a 4-vector with optional list of numbers for efficiency, isolation etc. How specified should these things be? Do jets point to constituents? Strong preference for keeping it simple.

We should define use cases, when is it a good idea for theorists to worry about detector simulation etc.

Would be useful to define some key plots which maybe could be used to check external sims against the detector in-house versions?


  • Comparison/Validation against internal detector simulations
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